🔀 Nice to have is quick to die

This week in The Pivot: being "nice to have" isn't compelling enough to get people to change behavior and pay money. Here's a quick test.

Hey friends 👋

Every Monday in The Pivot, we share one anti-pattern we’re seeing from founders in the Traction Lab ecosystem, and the quick redirect that makes all the difference—in just 250 words.

Here’s this week’s:

The anti-pattern: Building a nice-to-have and calling it a business.

Hearing “this would be nice to have” from customers and interpreting it as validation. You then spend months building features for problems that customers describe as frustrating but never actually pay to solve.

The tell? When you ask for the sale, suddenly there’s no urgency.

Customers love talking about their pain points in discovery calls, but when it’s time to sign, they ghost. You’re stuck in a spiral that ends in a startup un-aliving: solving problem #7 on their list, rather than problem #1.

The fix: Stop optimizing and start pressure-testing.

Go back to your happiest pilot users and ask: “What would have to break for you to need this solution this week?”

If they can’t answer, or if the answer is “nothing really,” you don’t have a painkiller—you have a vitamin.

Then ask what they’re actually spending money on right now to solve problems. Map those problems. Find the one where they’re already paying for a shitty solution or duct-taping something together.

That’s your entry point.

If your current product doesn’t solve that problem, either pivot the product or pivot the customer.

The tool: the Severity-Urgency Matrix

Map every problem on two axes—how severe is the pain (y-axis) and how urgent is it to solve (x-axis), and only build for the upper-right quadrant:

When the problem’s real… but the sale isn’t

If customers say “I really need this” but won’t pay for six months, it’s not urgent. If they say “this is annoying” but aren’t actively looking for solutions, it’s not severe.

And you need both.

See you in the new year, friends!

—jdm